Patriot Brief

• Steve Moore argues zoning laws are a core driver of America’s housing affordability crisis.

• Local governments restrict supply while pretending high prices are unavoidable.

• Donald Trump has signaled housing reform will be a major 2026 priority.

At this point, the housing crisis isn’t complicated — it’s just politically inconvenient. Steve Moore is saying out loud what everyone who’s tried to buy a house already knows: prices aren’t high because builders forgot how to build. They’re high because local governments have made it borderline illegal to add supply.

Zoning boards love to posture about “community character” while quietly ensuring that only people who already own homes get to benefit. It’s protectionism dressed up as virtue. Every delay, every restriction, every “study” adds cost, and those costs don’t disappear — they get passed straight to buyers who are already stretched thin.

Here’s the part politicians never want to admit: you can have rising home values and more affordable entry points at the same time. What you can’t have is artificial scarcity without consequences. When you choke supply for decades, prices explode. Then the same officials who caused the problem hold hearings asking why young people can’t afford houses anymore.

Moore’s point about equity matters too. For millions of Americans, their home isn’t some abstract investment — it’s their retirement plan. Blowing up home values to score affordability points would wreck middle-class balance sheets. The smarter solution is obvious: build more, build faster, and stop letting local busybodies veto growth.

If leaders are serious about housing, zoning reform isn’t optional. It’s the whole ballgame. Everything else is just noise designed to avoid upsetting the people who already got theirs.

From Daily Caller:

Economist Steve Moore on Monday said that eliminating local and state zoning restrictions will help solve the housing price crisis across the U.S.

Moore argued on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that getting rid of these restrictions would allow more homes to be built, which in turn would allow more Americans to purchase homes. Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration said that regulatory changes will speed up home construction and reward states that reduce barriers to building houses, NBC Palm Springs reported.

“Yes, housing is expensive today. But for every time that the value of a house goes up, that can be a positive for the economy. Look, I’m typical. I’m 65 years old. A lot of the equity that I have, a lot of the money I have is in the equity in my home,” Moore said. “So if the value of my home goes up, that’s a bad thing. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing. If you want to if you want to see price prices crash for the homes, that’s not going to be a very good thing.”

“This is a financial show. And you want rising home prices not. But we also need a greater supply. And that’s where at the state and local level, we have to get rid of a lot of the zoning restrictions on building housing,” Moore continued.

The surge in housing prices has prevented many Americans from buying a home, particularly young adults. Trump has signaled that housing affordability will be a major priority in 2026, hinting that he will propose the most aggressive housing reform plans in U.S. history.

Many economists have argued that restrictive zoning laws, often called “red tape,” increase housing prices, limit the supply of housing and hinder economic growth. Economists in favor of these restrictions say that they improve the quality of neighborhoods and protect homeowners’ property values.

The median age to buy a home in 2025 rose to an all-time high of 40 years old, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Source

Photo Credit: Screenshot/CNBC